Metal Detectors

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Gold Detectors

Do you suffer from GOLD FEVER?! Want to get out there and get your share but the idea of gold prospecting with a pan, sluice, or highbanker just isn't your idea of fun? That's OK because using a metal detector especially made for finding gold nuggets is one of the easiest, most profitable, and fun ways to find gold, coins, and other metallic treasures. Gold detectors are not necessarily higher in cost, but they are built with a higher sensitivity to detecting gold nuggets, have better ground balancing and discrimination abilities. So whether you're looking for gold in Arizona or Australia, searching volcanic rockslides in the Pacific Northwest, or hunting the black sand areas along a waterway, choose a metal detector made for the task! Scroll to the bottom of this page for more information on how a gold detector works.

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TIP: Generally speaking, the best way to hunt for gold nuggets with a metal detector is to hunt in the All Metal mode. Nuggets, depending on their size, shape, purity, and orientation in the ground, will all create different signals. If you hunt in the Discriminate mode, some nuggets may be lost. The best way to get rid of iron is to search in the All Metal mode and then check the targets in the Discriminate mode. This allows you to search and find all of the possible gold nuggets. Checking the targets with the Discriminate mode turned up just high enough to knock out the small iron will give you much more information before you decide to dig. Practice this by doing air tests to see the best setting for your particular metal detector.

How Does a Gold Detector Work?

If you've been prospecting for gold using a pan, sluice, highbanker or other traditional piece of equipment, there's another tool you may want to consider— a metal detector.

If you're not familiar with metal detecting, the first thing you should know is that your detector does not actually detect metal directly. It detects magnetic fields. When switched on, your VLF (very low frequency) detector first creates a magnetic field and energizes anything in the ground that responds to a magnetic field. Next, your detector seeks to find a magnetic field that has a response to its initial magnetic field. Because metals conduct electricity, they respond to a magnetic field and generate a small magnetic field of their own. Detectors detect the secondary magnetic field that conductive targets create whey they are energized by the first magnetic field sent into the ground by your detector. In general, the larger the metallic target, the larger and longer and stronger its magnetic response will be.

PI (pulse induction) detectors work a bit differently by putting magnetic field energy into the ground and then switching off and waiting a short period before they start to look for a response. This makes them better at handling ground mineralization than a VLF detector because during that short delay the magnetic response of iron trash minerals that you don't want to find dies out, but the signal from tiny bits of buried gold does, too. VLF detectors are more sensitive to finding the smallest bits of gold, but do not as easily cancel out ground mineralization.